How To Build A Beautiful Wedding Website In Under An Hour

When we first started working with Squarespace and their newly launched wedding websites, I was really excited. Prior to Squarespace, you basically only had two options for making a wedding website: a pre-designed template that would be easy to use, but probably a little (read: a lot) outdated when it comes to design. Or spend a ton of time and energy learning how to customize a website yourself. Squarespace bridged the gap. You could get beautiful website designs that didn’t require any coding knowledge for just $8 a month.

But recently, Squarespace has been updating their software, and it’s so much easier to use. Squarespace isn’t just about beautifully designed websites anymore. They’re about beautifully designed wedding websites that you can make in less than an hour. So if this is your first time at the rodeo, rest assured. If I can make a (pretty damn cool, if I dare say so myself) wedding website in the time that it takes to watch an episode of Scandal, so can you. Here’s the rundown:

1. Pick a Template Specifically Designed For Weddings

Because Squarespace is all about flexibility (unlike… pretty much every other wedding website service out there), you have the freedom to use one of their specifically designed wedding website templates… or any other template that they offer. But here’s a hot tip: picking one of their wedding designs will save you a lot of time and trouble. Yes, you can easily customize a regular Squarespace template to feel more wedding-y just by changing up the pictures and colors. But if you pick one of their wedding templates, you’ll start with all of the internal navigation set up more or less the way you want it. They even have pre-programmed pages for things like accommodations, registries, and RSVPs.

2. Easily Test The Looks Of Different Templates

Usually choosing a template is the most complicated part of designing a website, because once you pick a template you’re kind of stuck with it. Luckily you don’t have to worry about that with Squarespace. You can easily swap designs in and out of your site without losing any of your work simply by clicking on “design” and then “template.” Squarespace will automatically import any text or photos you may have uploaded to your previous template.

3. Go #Lazygirl with a cover page

The problem with me and websites is I always want it to look like I did a lot of work, without actually doing a lot of work. And the quickest way to accomplish that is with Squarespace’s new cover pages. You can add a cover page to any of Squarespace’s templates and get an easy wow factor with your landing page, before sending your guests through to the information they came for. And if you’re building your website early in the planning process, you can totally use a cover page as a save-the-date place holder while you work out the rest of the details.

4. Pictures are worth a thousand Words (And Now They Provide Photos)

Most of Squarespace’s templates work best with photos, and you’ll end up doing way less work if you have one or two images of you and your partner that you can let do the work for you. (Spoiler alert: they definitely don’t have to be professional photos.) But there are two new things that Squarespace has done to make that easier:

Stock Photos from Getty Images: Don’t have any pictures that fit the bill? No biggie. Squarespace recently inked a deal with Getty Images, so you can browse their gigantic library of photos to find stock images that work with your website. Each picture is just $10 to use. Pro tip: I did a super basic search for “love” and found half a dozen photos I would use on my own wedding website in the first page of results.

Photo editing in Squarespace: Let’s say you found a picture you like, and you want to use it as your cover image. But the way it’s cropped means your face is getting covered by text. You used to have to do a lot of trial and error and re-uploading to fix a problem like that, but now you can do all your photo editing right inside Squarespace with their updated design tools. Just click on “edit imagery” and then a little pencil shaped icon will show up when you hover over your photo. From there you can make all kinds of changes to your picture, from brightness and contrast to cropping, even minor blemish removal.

A note about images: It took me a while to figure out how to swap certain images within a template. So let me save you the trouble. In some places, you have to remove the pre-existing photo first, then Squarespace will prompt you to upload a new one or find one via Getty.

5. have fun with it

Making websites is not a thing I do for fun. In fact, despite having worked on one for almost half a decade, I still manage to break things when I’m not paying attention. But it’s nearly impossible to screw up your wedding website. As long as you’re providing information to your guests (more on that here), your website is doing exactly the job it’s supposed to do. And with Squarespace there’s basically nothing you can break that can’t be un-broken. So have fun. Because it’s one of the few wedding-related things nobody will try to tell you how to do the right way.

SQUARESPACE IS OFFERING 10% off your first squarespace purchase TO ALL APW READERS. JUST USE THE CODE APW16 AT CHECKOUT! CLICK HERE TO START YOUR 14-DAY FREE TRIAL.

This post was sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace makes beautiful wedding websites happen in a matter of minutes, thanks to their user-friendly software and modern, minimal template designs. In fact, you can see a bunch of APW reader-designed Squarespace wedding websites (some of which are included in this post) right here. Click here to start a free 14-day trial and make your wedding website today. APW readers get 10% off yearly subscriptions when you use the code APW16 at checkout.

Maddie Eisenhart

Chief Revenue Officer

Maddie is APW's Chief Revenue Officer. She's been writing stories about boys, crushes, and relationships since she was old enough to form shapes into words, but received her formal training (and a BS) from NYU in Entertainment and Mass Media in 2008. She now spends a significant amount of time thinking about trends on the internet and whether flower crowns will be out next year. A Maine native, she currently lives on a pony farm in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Michael, their son Lincoln, and an obnoxious mastiff named Gaia. Current hair color: Natural (gasp!)